Skip links

Main navigation

Articles to help you navigate photography, web design and business!

How to repurpose and customize stock photos for your business

Since starting Creative Convex last year, I ‘ve been learning a lot about using stock photos for your business. Finding the right stock photos that work for your business is hard. And if you do, they are usually quite an investment. Stock photos usually cost anywhere between $5 -$30 and can quickly add up as time goes by. So today let’s talk about a few ways you can repurpose and customize your stock photos so you can make the best use of every stock photo that you invest in and save some $$$ for your business.

Zoom and crop:

A high-resolution stock photo can be cropped to form several different stock photos that you can re-use. The Creative Convex stock photos are of high-resolution (5000px * 3000px) which allows cropping without loss of quality. Here’s an example. The photo on the left can be cropped in different ways to form 3 different photos that you can see on the right. These photos once cropped, can be used for social media, blog posts and promotions on their own. The trick here is to zoom and crop the original photo in ways that creates several independent photos.

Rotate and Transform :

You can rotate and flip the original stock photos to create different versions of it. Rotate the photo at an angle or just flip the photo vertically / horizontally to achieve a different effect like in the example below of the flowers.

Add filters :

Adding a color overlay or a filter is one of the best ways to not only repurpose your stock photos but to also customize them for your brand. You can find editing filters that transform the photo in a way that matches your brand. For example, if your brand has a monochromatic aesthetic, you can add a muted, black and white filter to edit the photo to match your brand. Or if your brand is super cheerful and colorful, you can enhance the photo with a saturation filter to make it more vibrant.

Add text :

If you want your images to stand out on visual marketing platforms like Pinterest and Bloglovin’, then embedding text on your images is the way to go. Depending on the photo, you can either add your text in the negative space of the photo or add a background overlay on which you can then embed the text.

Negative space: If your stock photo has some negative or white space in it, you can add your blog post title / promotion title in the negative space. For example in the photo on the left, I ‘ve used the white space at the top of the photo to embed my blog post title.

Background overlay: If your photo doesn’t have enough white space, then you can create a translucent background on your photo over which you can then embed your text. You can see this in action in the photo on the right below.

Customize it for your brand:

You can make the stock photo your own by embedding your brand features in it. You can stamp your logo on the image (just make sure you have the permission to do so) to help people instantly recognize your brand from the photo. Or you can add icons from your brand on the image to denote the topic of your content. You can also add borders and frames in your brand colors to personalize it. Here are a couple examples to spark your ideas.

Gradients and coloring :

You can also use color gradients and overlays to edit the colors of the photo to match your brand colors. This is similar to adding a filter, but its more personalized and helps your pictures stay on-brand. To do this, just pick your primary brand color and create a colored gradient overlay on the photo with it. You can do this in Photoshop by using the hue/saturation tool. As you can see below, its super easy to create colored versions of the same photo in a way that represents your brand better!

Make a collage:

Lastly you can create a collage by combining 3-4 photos to create one big image. You can get super creative with collage layouts and use one that works best for your brand. Canva is an amazing tool to help you create collages in awesome, creative layouts.

So my friend, these are the some of the ways you can repurpose your stock photos and get the bang for your buck when it comes to stock photos.

I love adding texts to styled photos and even stock photos and just pin it on my pinterest handle through my blog. Also, I really love to make collages for my social media posts especially on my Facebook Page.